Leaf scale

Steve Lowry won this month's competition with his image of a scale from an Elaeagnus leaf. Elaeagnus is a common evergreen garden shrub and scales like this cover pores on the underside of the leaves. This reduces the amount of water lost through the openings and makes the plant hardier.

The beautiful array of colours in Lowry's photo is a result of the interaction of polarised light with the scale's structure.

(Image: Steve Lowry)

Plane view

Flying above Sabzevar, north-eastern Iran, a glance out of the window presented Majid Masoomi Rad with this unique view – his plane's engine looks like it is about to engulf its own tiny shadow.

(Image: Majid Masoomi Rad)

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Supermoon

Last month saw a giant "supermoon" above us. The moon was on the closest transition of its elliptical orbit, when it approaches some 50,000 kilometres nearer than its most distant point.

Nilesh Puntambekar caught the moon as it began to drop behind a distant hill, silhouetting a tree in the foreground.

(Image: Nilesh Puntambekar)

Giant pine

Taken at Yosemite National Park, California, this photo of a pine cone atop a rock confuses our sense of scale. Is the cone giant? Or the rock outcrop tiny?

(Image: Jonathan Serbst)

Plucked palm

Again, a close hand and a distant tree play with our understanding of scale.

(Image: Rayid Rahman)

Up close and personal

"I wanted to play with the perception of scale and for the viewer to be uncertain about how big what they're looking at is," says photographer Bríd Ní Luasaigh. And indeed, our judges were perplexed. "Is it an aerial shot?" was the initial reaction. No, it is in fact a close-up of lichen taken in West Kerry, Ireland.

(Image: Bríd Ní Luasaigh)

Life in miniature

In this image James Turner has photographed what appears to be a model landscape. However this is an illusion created by a "tilt-shift" technique to create the appearance of a shallow depth of focus. By introducing foreground and background blur in this way, Turner has replicated the visual cues we would normally expect in a close-up of a miniature scene.